Recently I upgraded my home PC and I thought, well, how about loading it with only freeware/open source software (On top of Windows XP)? So I started looking around and found some excellent freeware, along with a lot of trash. It took some work to evaluate all the applications but in the end, it was worth it.
I have nothing against Micro$oft or any other ISV making money though. It was just that I was on a tight budget and I wanted to see whether it was really possible to live without commercial software. Here is what I have settled on in the end.
Audio:
Nothing beats good ol’ Winamp (classic) here for playing songs. For cataloging my music collection, I use MPEG Audio Collection. It is very lightweight and can read all types of audio files. It uses Windows default player (winamp here) to play music. Apple’s iTunes is also good but it’s very resource intensive, especially if you choose to normalize the volume. I use both MAC and iTunes as they serve two different purposes. With MPEG Audio Collection, you can catalog all your CDs and search for the songs without needing the original CD. On the other hand, iTunes does not allow you to play songs based on the folders (location) but you can do that in MPEG Audio Collection.
What good is winamp without some music for it to play and again I turned to freeware. There are more sources of legal free music on the internet than we know or care about and that’s where irate comes in. When you run this program for the first time, it will download 10 tracks at random from different sources. You listen to each song and rate it on a scale of 0 to 10. Say you rate country songs higher than Blues. Then the program will start downloading more of country songs. With a little bit of training, the program can give you a hit ratio of 70% or more. And these are not streams or samples or pirated songs. These are free-as-in-beer full songs. And you can just right click on an artist’s name and visit their website.
I use CDex for CD ripping and mp3Trim for occasional mp3 editing.
Video:
Even though I got a copy of PowerDVD when I bought my DVD-ROM drive, I don’t use it as I am planning to use only freeware. But this is one area where I was disappointed. I could not find any good DVD players which are also freeware. The best I could find was VideoLan. Its interface is not as eye-candy as PowerDVD but it does play every imaginable file format, even those files that other softwares refuse to play. It’s very lightweight and highly customizable. Don’t be put off by its interface.
For video editing and capturing, the most popular freeware application is VirtualDub. For casual use, Windows Movie Maker 2 is a good choice.
CD/DVD writing:
I had always used Nero for this but CD Burner XP Pro is an excellent piece of software. It’s hard to believe that something like this is free! It works with IDE, USB, IEEE1384, SCSI CD/DVD recorders, can create bootable discs, iso files, audio CDs etc. And best of all, it has a very powerful CD ripper, featuring ogg and wma, in addition to mp3. It has made me forget Nero and that’s saying a lot.
For viewing image file, I use CDmage. It supports more than 25 formats, including .nrg, .ccd, .iso, and does an amazing variety of things.
Productivity:
The first application that comes to mind in this category is OpenOffice. It should serve you well for almost all of your needs. In case you get a complex layout file that was created in MS Office and OpenOffice is unable to render it properly, you can always download the free viewers for Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Visio from Microsoft site. I tried Abiword also but I did not like its interface that much. And since you’d be installing OpenOffice anyway, there is no need for any other word processor.
I use Keynote for note taking. It is very lightweight and has a nice tabbed interface. You can also use free version of Treepad but it does not support images.
Internet Browsing:
There are two choices for browsing the internet. Firefox and MyIE2. I do not prefer firefox that much because of its memory leak problems. Use it for 10 minutes and it would start taking 60-70 MB of RAM. But it’s very secure and comes with a built-in pop up blocker. It is recommended only if you have atleast 256 MB of RAM. Otherwise it’s better to use MyIE2 which is a shell around IE. It also supports tabbed browsing and has many more features than firefox.
Mail:
Thunderbird from mozilla organization. Though I mostly use gmail/yahoo for personal emails (at home).
IM:
Gaim is a multi-protocol IM software, supporting Yahoo, MSN messanger, AIM, ICQ, IRC, and few more. It allows you to compose your messages using its built-in WYSIWYG interface. And if your friends have multiple accounts, it can club them into one single entry which you can expand if needed. It even has RSA encryption (through a plugin). Miranda is another very good IM software.
Anti-virus:
I use a product (appropriately) called antivir from H+BEDV. It is very light on the resources and gets updated daily. You can also use AVG anti-virus from Grisoft but antivir gives you much more fine-grained control over dealing with viruses.
Firewall:
I use Kerio personal firewall from Kerio technologies. It’s highly customizable and in addition to providing network security, it also provides very good system level security. Meaning it will alert you if an executable tries to launch another executable. And you can create custom access rules for different programs. Zonelabs also gives a free version of their famous zonealarm firewall but free version does not allow you to specify policies for individual programs. Though Sygate personal firewall is also good, you can create only 20 custom rules in free version. Needless to say, do not trust Windows firewall that comes with XP SP2.
Data Compression:
7-Zip is the best freeware compression tool out there. Its proprietary compression format 7z claims 30-70% better compression ratios when compared to regular zip format. It even supports rpms and deb formats,in addition to all the other major ones.
Imaging:
irfanview is the best freeware image viewer/editor that I have used till date. It supports any image file format that you have ever heard of. And its editing capablities are more than sufficient for casual users. You can crop/convert/apply filters/get EXIF/create slideshows/change color depth and do many more things. Don’t forget to install the plugins though.
For everything else, there is of course gimp. One more good application is Paint.net. It is under active development but looks very promising. You need .Net runtime for this though.
File Utilities:
SC-DiskInfo will quickly show you how much disk space is being used by different directories. Run it on ‘Documents and Settings’ folder and be surprised by the amount of space being taken by temp files. It displays the space usage in a very nice bar graph. If you keep wondering where your disk space has gone, get this software.
To recover files that got emptied from recycle bin also, Restoration is a very handy utility. It woks on all versions of Windows and does not need any installation. Just unzip and run it, preferrably from a floppy.
Misc:
Some other programs that I use are – Spybot Search&Destroy for removing spyware, CmdHere power toy from Microsoft (for Windows XP), free version of Joel Spolsky’s CityDesk for (clean) HTML composing, and Clip Path for capturing the full path of a file/directory to clipboard.
There are many more programs out there than I could ever test. But these should be sufficient for an average home user. And if you like any of these, consider donating some money to the developers. Even five or ten dollars go a long way towards paying bandwidth and hardware costs. You can also help with documentation or programming. At the minimum, send an appreciation email to the developers and thank them. It does wonders for their motivation and encourages them to continue working on the application. Some sites like SourceForge sell T-shirts and you can show your support by buying them. Remember, no help is small help.
Let’s go exploring:
If you want all this software and more on one CD, here are some links to explore –
The Open CD – Offers CDs and free iso images containing most of the applications listed here and many more. Updated regularly.
GNUWin – This is similar to OpenCD but offers a lot more software. It was lagging a bit in terms of updates (at the time of this writing) by abount two months.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
Look here: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?threadid=399319
There are lots out there, but most of those you mention are closed source and don’t use the OSS style development cycle. This out lines a nice system using free components, though.
I also pondered this question, but chose less than an hour for a full Linux install instead of many hours searching the web.
I can’t speak for/against memory leaks by FireFox, but I do know that many people get confused between Mozilla memory leaks and memory cache use.
Please check Tools->Options->Privacy->Cache before concluding memory leaks as a culprit. “Why is my browser using 90 MB?” “Because it takes 20 MB to run and is storing 70 MB of porn images you’ve been surfing for the last week.”
Flushing the cache and rechecking the memory may give surprising results.
Another good CD compilation of open-source software for Windows is the Open Source Software CD.
http://pmw.myip.org/oss/
Personally, I use foobar2000 (http://foobar2000.org/) for audio playback. I’ve used Winamp previously, but I prefer fb2k due to the minimalist interface, the extensibility and the small memory footprint compared to others. (Fb2k uses 7 mb on my machine, iTunes used about 50 mb.)
For video I use BSPlayer (http://bsplayer.com/). It’s functional, fast and takes up very little screen estate using the right skin. Well worth a try.
I have no experience with CDmage, but Deamon Tools (http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/portal/index.php) has always worked great for me.
I got Thunderbird installed, but though I’m a fan of the Mozilla foundation, I use Eudora (http://www.eudora.com/) for my mailing activities. It’s powerful and free. (Assuming you can survive a non-intrusive advertisement panel. Non-spyware, that is. If you don’t want it, you can switch to the Lite version by entering the Settings panel, but this disables some advanced features.)
Pegasus Mail (http://www.pmail.com/) is also an excellent e-mail program.
Sorry for getting carried away… ^^
Free/OSS FTP server and FTP clients @ filezilla.sourceforge.net
k-lite codec pack is a must-have:
http://home.hccnet.nl/h.edskes/mirror.htm
tightvnc.org
Freeware is software which is royalty-free for commercial and non-commercial usage.
Free Software is defined by the 4 rules which define that which means for example the source should be available. OSI’s definition is similar.
<< Title: Freeware Suggestions under Windows
Recently I upgraded my home PC and I thought, well, how about loading it with only freeware/open source software (On top of Windows XP)? So I started looking around and found some excellent freeware, along with a lot of trash. It took some work to evaluate all the applications but in the end, it was worth it.
So i’d say this article ain’t about FLOSS on Windows it is about freeware on Windows which does includes a number of FLOSS applications.
(A good read it was IMO.)
Nice article, to the point, no moral and fingerpointing and stuff, just gave me exactly what the title said.
Good article, I’d prefer more of these un-flameable articles.
The K-lite Codec pack bogs down your system with a lot of stuff you don’t need.
If you install ffdshow (http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/codecs_and_filters…) and XviD (http://www.roeder.goe.net/~koepi/xvid.shtml – Get the file “Latest standalone decoder DirectShow filter (installer)”), you will be able to play just about anything you could scavenge off the net.
How many times must one make this distinction?
MAC is not Macintosh
Macintosh is Mac for short!
Another free video player that is my personal fav. is bsplayer ( http://www.bsplayer.com ) Very simple, yet very complex at the same time, check it out.
I just closed firefox and got back 500MB. I have my cache set to 50MB. I think there is a leak. Still the best browser for me though.
What version of firefox are you running. .9.1 here with 4 windows open on some pretty graphicly heavy sites takes up about ~40 megs and is stable…no memory leak here. What plugins/extensions do you have installed?
I would add to that:
.Mail: Foxmail (Freeware: only mail program I know supporting remote mail on Windows)
.Web: Opera (“Free”: fully functionnal but displays small text Ads)
.Desktop sidebar (Freeware customizable Longhorn like sidebar)
.VirtuaWin (GPL: provides multiple virtual screens)
.Media players: MediaPlayerClassic (GPL), Viplay (Freeware)
.Grabit: newsreader (Freeware)
.XChat (should I precise ?
GPL IRC client)
.LCC-Win32: Free C IDE+Compiler (*not* based on GCC !)
.DigitalMars Compiler: Free C++ FAST and very little ressource-hungry compiler&linker (again, nothing to do with GCC)
…
“I just closed firefox and got back 500MB. I have my cache set to 50MB. I think there is a leak. Still the best browser for me though.”
I don’t think that’s a leak, but it’s a common issue. The cache doesn’t seem to restrict itself very well. Memory leaks are a very specific technical term folks, it doesn’t apply to all extraneous memory usage.
The K-lite Codec pack bogs down your system with a lot of stuff you don’t need.
You can disable and enable stuff what you want to install during the installtion.
Nothing beats good ol’ Winamp (classic) here for playing songs.
foobar2000 beats winamp.
http://www.foobar2000.org/
What about freeware and/or FLOSS games? There are good one out there.
Neverball: A puzzle game in which you have to control a platform on which a ball resides. You have to move the ball over the the exit point and/or collect coins in the meanwhile. Runs on Linux/Win32. (Available on The Open CD and Icculus.org). FLOSS.
Jump ‘n Bump: Another puzzle game. (Available on Icculus.org). FLOSS.
Clanbomber: A funny Bomberman clone. Doesn’t have network support and development has stalled. (Available on Clanbomber.de). FLOSS.
RTCW: ET: A multiplayer FPS similar to RTCW but free as in beer. (Available all over on the Internet). Freeware.
I’m running 9.3 – I do have tons of extensions running, adblock, web developer, DOM inspector, tabbed browser stuff…
I should qualify that I had been running firefox for about 2 days without closing it. However this does seem to be a leak whether it’s coming from extensions or not.
if you wanted some free software you should’ve started with FREE – i like debian.org but windows can’t be a good start for free!
Virtually all of the software (Irfanview, Miranda, Kerio, 7-Zip, WinAMP) the author recommended would be what I myself would recommend (though I prefer the avast! antivirus to either of the other two listed, and I would note that Kerio 2.1.5 is far superior to the new 4.x series — there’s no direct link to 2.1.5 on the Kerio site, but if you browse their download server, it’s in the same directory as the 4.x downloads). And while I much prefer the lithe Miranda over the bloated GAIM (and so on), the author did list ’em both.
One piece of software that ought to have been on the list, despite not truly falling within any of the categories (productivity, maybe?), is Arachnophilia 4.0. It’s the very best text/HTML/RTF editor around and used to be one of the most popular, but the new Java-based 5.x series has left Arachnophilia a shadow of its former self.
LeechFTP is a solid (although dated) free FTP client, but I’ve now switched to CoreFTP Lite as the latter supports SFTP and FTP over SSL.
For web browsing and mail, I use Opera, which is arguably free (the free version has a small row of Google text ads at the top of the window) — if that qualifies for the “free” moniker, it’s a hands-down winner over Firefox, Thunderbird, and Eudora.
crazybrowser @ http://www.crazybrowser.com
And I noticed they already mentioned CDex.
Then there’s Cygwin with XFree86 or possibly Xorg which should support rootless X11 windows on Windows.
And Linux for Windows, which I haven’t had the time to check out.
“I can’t speak for/against memory leaks by FireFox, but I do know that many people get confused between Mozilla memory leaks and memory cache use. ”
You know it’s not the cache when you set your cache to 0mb and it still gobbles up your ram faster than you can say “1-2-3.”
People in the Mozillazine forums will tell you the memory issues are well known and the developers are in no hurry to fix them. (Or won’t fix them at all.)
I use firefox as my main browser (and won’t use anything else) but these memory issues drive me nut. (try using it on a box with 128mb ram or less) It seems that when they say “lean” and “not bloated” they mean the download size of the program only.
“Grabit: newsreader (Freeware)”
GrabIt is a “usenet binary leecher”. GrabIt ain’t a “newsreader” like Agent, PAN, XNews and Forte are. It has only very little support for reading; in contrast it is excellent for grabbing binaries.
Available on http://www.shemes.com. It works in WINE as well minus a cosmetic bug, but decent enough IMO.
Don’t forget ClamAntivirus. It works under Windows very nicely. Its actually came from the Clam Antivirus for Linux.
http://www.clamwin.com/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1
XPLite or 98Lite from http://www.litepc.com
Nuff said.
Paint,Web,Dtp: http://www.freeserifsoftware.com
Imageview: http://www.xnview.com
AG antivirus can be better choice when anyone uses Outlook [Express]
The guy has no idea what a memory leak is. Of course there are memory leaks in mozilla/ff (search bugzilla), but you can tell because there are bugs issued and confirmed spotting them, not by running the program for a few days and watching the windows task manager! How do you know all the memory used in not properly allocated and being usefully referenced? A memory leak is a situation when there is an allocated memory block that cannot or will not be freed even when it is not needed/referenced anymore.
Anyone know of a free Ghost alternative, one that supports NTFS and the various Linux file systems? Also, looking for a good freeware telnet app that has a tabbed interface.
Also, this is a good read. I thought about writing an article like this, because anytime Linux pundits go into the cost issue, they immediately figure $500 into the cost Windows for MS Office, and assume that you’ll need to pay for anti-virus, firewalls, etcl.
As for other freeware apps, check out:
– Trillian (the free version)
– Crimson editor (Text editing)
– SmartFTP (Awesome FTP app, but non-commercial only)
– MyIE2 (Best IE ‘shell’ browser there is, for those times when you NEED to use IE. Piss on Crazybrowser)
– RBTray (Best ‘miminize to system tray’ app there is)
Good article, a few more good ones
– HijackThis (http://www.spychecker.com/program/hijackthis.html) for very simple but helpful spyware diagnosing
– MPC (http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/) for a lightweight video player
– Palm Desktop (http://www.palmone.com/us/support/windt.html)
– MBSA (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/tools/mbsahome.mspx), for keeping the OS security patched up
I would add samurize: http://www.samurize.com . It’s like superkaramba or gdesklets, only much better, faster and with tons of plugins.
FTP/Web server: BRS WebWeaver
Free Small (~1Mb) and easy to use ftp/web server.
🙂
Hi, there are some other suggestions on my site: http://www.slapo.net/. Javascript has to be enabled to see the menu.
May not technically be memory leaks! What may be happening (I have no way to confirm/deny in this case) is that the memory management is simplistic and doesn’t at all worry about a common long-term problem: fragmentation. An application can technically be completely free of memory leaks, and yet have the memory usage balloon up to a huge amount in terms of what the swap space/system reserves for it. A web browser is one of the worst things in terms of fragmentation potential: you have the small strings, with the contrasts of blocks of memory from a few times that, to huge blocks (from a few K to many hundreds of K or more) that are allocated and freed. If you don’t take efforts to reuse lists of holes for similar sized blocks, even if it seems wasteful to put something a bit smaller in a block and only treat it as that whole larger block (for example, if it is 32769 bytes and storing it in a 65536 byte block seems wasteful at first, as does storing 40000 bytes in that same block) in the longer term it may end up preventing memory usage in the total system from getting completely out of hand.
This is a very real issue with a server system or an embedded application: fragmentation can end up eventually eating up all available memory in the system and make it impossible to allocate a large enough block for some particular task. I have seen this on systems that use a combination of resources under Windows that don’t have a way to unify memory management, such as a combination of COM, OpenGL, MFC, STL, etc. all in use in the same application, along with perhaps other libraries. While the application in question (in this case, it was press brake software) had no resource or memory leaks, the memory usage eventually got to a point where it was too much for the requirements: this required a warm restart of the application, because there wasn’t a method to release all the fragmented memory blocks and unsnarl the heap for the application otherwise.
Now, if you also have some portions leaking memory in addition to fragmentation overall, yes, you’ve got BIG problems!
As an interesting experiment (if there are those out there that don’t completely reboot their Windows systems often) you’d like to think that Windows and Explorer don’t have memory/resource leaks. It seems to me they don’t, but the DO suffer from memory fragmentation (Explorer, be it IE or Windows Explorer) based on my observation. If I’ve left my system running for a long enough time between restarts of the applications in question, the system memory usage grows to the point where things really slow down. When I completely restart Explorer (don’t need to restart XP that often unless some other issue arises) that memory is released, and the system is decent again. Note that this takes possibly several weeks or a couple of months…
(yes, I’ve had XP and Windows 2000 running without clean restarts for more than 2 months heavy use)
I’m surprised iTunes wasn’t mentioned as a free MP3 player…
Available for free download from Apple and it works great for me!
Quite informative. Both – article and comments.
I’d add Avast antivirus to the list http://www.avast.com .
There’s a free Home version available. The software itself is not bad at all and the website forum is also very helpful when problems are encountered. I’m using it myself and I’m quite happy with it.
<< Anyone know of a free Ghost alternative, one that supports NTFS and the various Linux file systems?
>> Yes.
Ghost for Linux (http://freshmeat.net/projects/g4l) i have no clue on this.
Partition Image (http://freshmeat.net/projects/partimage) i’ve used this and i found it excellent.
Recovery Is Possible (http://freshmeat.net/projects/recoveryispossible) is a CD which one can use use to backup and restore NTFS, Ext3FS partitions. Plus many more than that alone.
#1 and #2 are for Linux but you might get them ported, or they are ported in Cygwin. #3 is a CD and thus is OS-independant.
ISO Burner: ISO Recorder Power Toy http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm
FTP Client: SmartFTP http://www.smartftp.com/
MP3 Player: iTunes http://www.itunes.com/
Thanks for sharing them. Most of them I already use, though 🙂
“….you’d like to think that Windows and Explorer don’t have memory/resource leaks…”
I experience the same problem with XP. Explorer.exe would eat up a lot of ram and things started to slow down. (I copy/move/delete files a lot using Windows Explorer.) I had to kill the process and restart it. I didn’t have this problem with 2000. (I just upgraded to XP from 2000.) Actually, it doesn’t take several weeks, I managed to do it in a week of use. That’s why I liked 2000 much better than XP.
Btw, anyone uses KeePass Password Safe? A pretty good program to safely store all my passwords. It’s light weight and free.
The best site I know of for Windows freeware is
http://www.snapfiles.com/freeware/freeware.html
Groups stuff nicely by category
js
if you honestly think it’s a good idea to use IE right now, and alllll those security warnings didn’t drive the point home, it’s a security nightmare. not to mention the spyware you’ll get just browsing the web. even with a patched system and antivirus. in other words, do NOT use myie2. it’s as bad.
you’re not having memory issues. firefox naturally uses 70mb. it’s just caching as much stuff as it can for efficient usage.
putty
media player classic
virtualdub
can’t believe these didn’t get mentioned!
I’ve seen many good programs here for Windows. Only thing I don’t really see is a good Ghost clone for Windows nor do I see a clone of Lotus 1-2-3. Don’t get me wrong, Open Office is great but it’s not Lotus. Guess I’m an 80’s relic or so. Above all, I try to keep my Windows Open Sourced, especially since I use Windows and Linux.
Winamp, Foobar2k? No way! Coolplayer rules them all!
Features:
* GNU General Public License
* Freeform Skins
* Simple User Interface
* Advanced Playlist editor
* Internet streaming
* ID3 Multitagger
* File Renamer
* Fast mp3->wav converter
* MAD mpeg engine
* OGG Vorbis support
* Winamp input plugins support
* Smallest executable programmed in blazing fast ‘C’
* Continuous play
* 8 band precision equalizer
* Lot’s more…
http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/
>> I have nothing against Micro$oft or any other ISV
>> making money though.
When you have nothing against Microsoft because they have to make money, why are you writing it with that dollar sign in it?
Anyway, some more FREE (not OSS) software for Windows:
– Pandion: http://www.pandion.be
Instant messenger for XMPP and Jabber networks, looks pretty good.
– ArtRage: http://www.ambientdesign.com
Painting package for a realistic and fun simulation of using paint on a canvas, along with pens, pencils, crayons and other tools. Personally I think this one rocks, it doesn’t take huge amounts of memory like Painter (of course it has much less features than Painter) and it’s absolutely lovely for doing quick drawings or paintings with it.
btw. Funny that not any site about Linux noticed that MainConcept released MainActor 5 for Linux (!), a cheap video editor that used to be Windows-only:
http://www.mainconcept.com/index_noflash.shtml
(the url to the linux page is at the no_flash link above, so don’t go straight to mainconcept.com where you’ll get some other flash ad)
I’ve personally found VideoLan to be pretty buggy when trying to play DVDs. It’s crashed when I try to switch audio tracks, bring up menus, and so on.
ADAWARE
ADOBE reader and type manager
BURNATONCE 0.99
CUTEPDF WRITER 2
FILEZILLA_2_2_8A
FLASHGET 1.6
GOOGLETOOLBARANDPOPUPBLOCKER
IRFANVIEW 3
MACROMEDIA FLASH PLAYER 7
OPEN OFFICE 112
PRINT FOLDERS 2
QUICKTIME 6.5
REAL ALTERNATE
SPAMBAYESFOROUTLOOKANDPOP
SPYBOT SEARCH AND DESTROY 1.3
SUNS JAVA 142_05
WINRAR 330
ZONEALARM 51_011
freeware, nagware, open source…..
i find the gui on that tool anoying, there is no extract all button that i could find…
personaly im currently using tugzip: http://www.tugzip.com/
a very nice program that can even eat 7-zips 7z files:)
I don’t like Winamp as much as Deli Player:
http://www.deliplayer.com/
I haven’t used Winamp in about four years now.
Especially for a Linux zealot like me who doesn’t use Windows very often and has problems finding the Software he is looking for.
I was indeed searching a free CD burning app and now I found it.
Thanks.
dunno about windows, but i’m running firefox 0.9.3 on a 128MB linux box here and it’s fine. with adblock enabled and some fairly heavy adblock rules, it uses 38MB of memory.
> Needless to say, do not trust Windows firewall that comes with XP SP2
Please alleviate this kind of propaganda.. please..
now that looked like a sexy player, thanks for the info:)
and im running mozilla 1.7.3 here at around 40megs so most likely the writer of the original firefox post have a extention or something thats going haywire. better check for updates or try to uninstall/disable some of them…
“I use both MAC and iTunes…. With (M)PEG (A)udio (C)ollection”……..
Always amusing when the Mac Brigade leap to (wrong) conclusions to defend their honour 😉
I don’t think it ha been meantioned, but my favorite FTP/SFTP client is FileZilla, which is free and entirely open source.
http://filezilla.sf.net/
Works very well and can handle multiple transfers at the same time. We use it here at work.
Not exactly something for the average user, but ‘Snare for Windows’ http://www.intersectalliance.com/projects/index.html is damn handy for system administrators who want to collect all their eventlog information into one place.
Some of the other things that always seem to end up on most of my windows boxes include:
* Perl
* Tight VNC
* putty/scp
* cygwin
I can’t believe it. So many comments and nobody mentioned http://www.pricelessware.org yet.
iTunes WAS mentioned. He just said he preferred Winamp, which is fair enough since the two aren’t particularly similar.
For all the people going on about “memory leaks” – Programs are _meant_ to use RAM. Firefox is probably caching every single thing it can find in RAM on the off chance you might visit it again – if something else needs RAM all that cache will be dropped. There’s no point in having 512MB of RAM if you keep 70% of it free the whole time.
Personally I’m a fan of Trillian – the free version would slot perfectly into here. Gaim hasn’t impressed me at all – maybe I should try Miranda.
@mini-me (IP: —.media.umb.edu) – Posted on 2004-08-18 19:20:23
How many times must one make this distinction?
MAC is not Macintosh
Macintosh is Mac for short!
He wasn’t talking about a Macintosh computer, he was talking about MPEG Audio Collection.
A memory leak occurs when objects that are created in memory don’t get destroyed or released. Experts use advanced profiling and monitoring tools to detect memory leaks.
Here we are on osnews discussing the memory leaks we discovered using Windows’ Task Manager. Incredible!
anyone know of any XP apps out there that are similar in function to Quicksilver/LaunchBar on OS X?
“I use firefox as my main browser (and won’t use anything else) but these memory issues drive me nut. (try using it on a box with 128mb ram or less) It seems that when they say “lean” and “not bloated” they mean the download size of the program only.
”
I used it on a system with 56MB of system RAM, and I was also running Gaim and usually one other small application. The swapping was in no way unbarable.
I think they aren’t about to fix it because it’s a memory usage thing, not a memory leakage thing. I think you’d be getting into a memory vs cpu argument, and obviously the mozilla developers think people whould buy enough RAM and not waste CPU cycles to do uneccassary things to cut memory usage.
My only problem is with images. I’ve gotten Mozilla to use over 250MB of RAM. Course once I close the tab it frees my memory (it didn’t used to).
My current usage is about 65MB, 35 of which is reported as shared (I realize most of that shared is prolly XUL and nothing else is going to use it but thunderbird).
I’m finally liking firefox, I used to despise it because I found it unstable. .9 was the clencher for me, .8 was barable but not a pleasure.
Like I say, I don’t think it’s leaks because I see Mozilla cleaning it up at predictable times. I guess I only keep a browser window in use for several hours though, maybe that 10 millionth page load is the clencher?
dont forget CoolPlayer has really less memory foot print and minimal interface
Sure. It looks nice. But can you figure out which dohickey opens the play list? Was it the square or the triangles that switch it into file mode?
Pardon my rant, but the only (PC) DVD player I have used with a comprehensible (I won’t talk about intuitive) interface was Windows Media Player. And that’s really an audio player interface. Why can’t DVD player manufacturers learn from the likes of Winamp and XMMS? They are simple enough (just like analog devices) despite the non-standard GUIs.
I may not like Microsoft’s OS, or their buisness tactics, but they do make the best tweaking software for Windows. I have gotten lots of mileage out of their free Windows XP PowerToys. It’s a package of tools that provide random hacks (autologin) through GUI (no registry editing) and handy but simplistic tools like the HTML slideshow generator.
My absolute favorite Microsoft Powertoy is the Virtual Desktop Manager. It’s a clone from Unix, of course, and much slower than the origional, but it still helps me keep my desktop organized.
If you want some fun experimenting with unusual login screens, I recommend LoginLoader. Also, MacroMaker is a handy tool for registering hotkeys so they point to usefull functions. It can use hand scripted or recorded macros. I recomend writting them by hand. Most of the time, I used it for things that didn’t need all the features, greatly reducing the complexity of use.
context for text editing (too bad textpad is not free)
avast antivirus
inkscape
bfilter – http proxy for removing adds and such from webpages…highly recommended
cygwin – *nix console apps and more
bloodshed dev-c++ – c and c++ ide…very good
I try to use the same apps on my primary Linux machine and my work and gaming Windows machines so I use alot of free and open software in Windows.
I’d love a program that keeps my “Always Hide” toolbar icons from showing back up again. Only in Windows does “always hide” mean “hide until the os decides they should be shown again”.
Irfanview is a great little image viewer with a small footprint and lots o’ options.
http://www.irfanview.com
Great article.
Check out pricelessware.org for the highest rated freeware.
DVDShink does a decent job of copying a movie DVD. Does anybody know of one that’s better?
I don’t know if MyIE2 counts, since – I think – that runs on top of MSIE – it isn’t a free standing application.
I’m sure that I’ll overlook some but here goes.
Cygwin and GNU Emacs: As a user of Unix/Linux for 20+ years, I couldn’t live without these. (http://www.cygwin.com/, http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/)
FireFox: I seldom have to revert to IE anymore. Yea! (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/)
Sam Spade: Nice general network utility with ping, dig, traceroute, DNS, whois, etc. (http://www.samspade.org/ssw/)
Space Monger: Very nice visual disk usage tool. (http://www.werkema.com/software/spacemonger.html)
ISO Recorder: Nice dll which adds windows explorer menu options for writing and copying ISO files with a CDR. (http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder/isorecorder.htm)
WinCVS: CVS client for Windows. (http://www.wincvs.org/)
WinSCP: SCP client for Windows. (http://winscp.sourceforge.net/eng/)
TeraTerm: Terminal emulator with an optional SSH extension. (http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA002416/teraterm.html)
Inkscape: Very slick SVG editor similar to Illustrator. (http://www.inkscape.org/)
Dia: Visio-like drawing tool that I haven’t used much yet but it looks promising. (http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/)
GIMP: I own an old version of Photoshop on an old Mac but I never use it anymore. GIMP is on all of my desktop Windows and Linux boxes. (http://www.gimp.org/)
MyIE2 is now called Maxthon. I heard that maxthon can even use Gecko instead of IE for rendering. Anybody tried that? Can I use Firefox engine instead of Mozilla. I really don’t want to install big and ugly Mozilla just to try that.
http://www.oldversion.com/ is a good site to bookmark.
For CD Burning CD Burner XP Pro
For MP3 and Audio Playback I use Zinf
For IM I use Gaim
For Productivity I use Openoffice or 602Software
For browsing I use Netscape
For web page authoring I use NVU
For mail I use Thunderbird
Anti-Virus I use Avast Home Edition
CD Ripping CDEx
For C++ and Java Development I use Eclipse
For C# and Visual Basic .NET development I use SharpDevelop and Borland C#Builder
For Virtual Desktops I use Microsoft DeskMan powertoy
For FTP I use FileZilla
Keynote (http://keynote.sourceforge.net) is the opensource version of treepad and it supports webpages and iimages.
Zipgenius is also a very awesome free zip program. no trials no nagging no nothing.
firefox should do i think. still i dont understand why they have not made gecko available as a freestanding library. maybe its an effect of it rendering the whole gui in mozilla? in so then gecko is in fact mozilla:)
Snapfiles is great. Thank you!
This has been a great article and thread! One thing that I’m missing, though, is a tool to grab data CD images so that I can keep them on my hard drive and load them through something like Daemon Tools. Any ideas? Thanks.
First, for a stand alone Gecko, look for MozillaControl.
Archiving: IZARC
Remote Desktop: Ultr@vnc
Depending on The system for productivity:
* Low Resource (32-64Mb/RAM) = AbiWord + Sygmiphic Software’s Spreadsheet
* Mid Resource (64-128Mb/RAM) = 602 PC Suite
* Most modern Systems = OpenOffice
Audio = Winamp Classic, Audacity, LAME
Video = Media Player Classic, XMMS Win32
Paint = Irfanview,Pixia
PDF = PrimoPDF/Acrobat Reader
IM = Gaim
Web = Firefox
E-Mail = Thunderbird … If I need Outlook, I use Outlook 98
To all the people who says Memory leaks are detected using special profiling tools, i must say that yes you are right, but Task Manager is a good first hand indication that something wrong is going on, if a program’s memory shown in task manager, keeps on increasing over time.
I have yet to see a program which keeps eating up your RAM and doesn’t have a memory leak or other design problem.
I like QCD, aka Quintessential Player, for audio.
http://www.quinnware.com/
“firefox should do i think. still i dont understand why they have not made gecko available as a freestanding library.”
there are plans to seperate it from version 2.0
The OSSwin project: Open Source for Windows!
http://osswin.sourceforge.net/
As we all know, there’s a lot of commercial, closed source software out there. Many people (including me) don’t agree with the fact that the source remains closed and believe that releasing the source code helps improving the software in many ways. There *do* exist Open Source alternatives for most of the non-free, closed source stuff out there. One of them is the GNU/Linux Operating System.
Unfortunately, as a computerscientist/geek I’ve noticed that a lot people are afraid to install a Free Operating System like Linux. That’s why I started looking for Open Source Software (OSS) under Windows.
Within this document, you should be able to find software which is able to replace much of the proprietary software most Windows-users use nowadays. Feel free to download, install, copy and use them: it’s completely legal to do so!
http://osswin.sourceforge.net/
Task Manager gives an incredibly rough view of things, at best. Where Windows is managing all the heaps used in the application, fragmentation can still be an issue, because modern versions of Windows don’t require or allow you to use memory handles for small segments of memory.
Task Manager won’t tell you when an application is actually leaking memory very precisely. If you use C/C++, you can readily instrument your memory management/allocation to count what you’ve allocated and compare it to what you free at the end of the program. Even if you have everything released properly, fragmentation can still happen within the process address space as Windows works on finding room for whatever it does with various structures in the process space for that application. Of course, the application I mentioned previously really was a rather interesting beast in terms of all the things it included. I don’t know that the memory usage would remain climbing upward until it ran out (I don’t think so, but I’m not 100% certain: I haven’t worked there for awhile, and wasn’t there to see it completed) on a heavier duty machine, but because of what it was and the hardware requirement for RAM and speed, it became unacceptable. Including several different memory hungry libraries (COM/ADO/OpenGL/MFC) made things rather interesting, as it wasn’t easy to make them all work together nicely for memory usage. There were no leaks, but the memory usage was not optimal. MFC doesn’t make it easy to subvert their “optimizations” in certain places, because some of the memory management done in MFC is inline. And of course, OpenGL (as of that time and on Windows NT/9x) had no provision for replacing the memory management.
The application was run for 24 hours a day for several weeks on end using Visual Test scripts to make it run at top speed (limited by mechanical machine time limitations) and the memory management wasn’t optimized at that point. Even when we made it reinitialize all the data structures after cleaning up all allocations of resources, Windows STILL didn’t return the mapped memory to the system: the heaps weren’t reduced properly. Perhaps this was/is a flaw
in the MFC libraries, I don’t know. With .Net now out and about, and Longhorn coming sooner or later, perhaps MFC applications will become more of a legacy thing like Cobol program maintenance
I suppose it could be readily argued that the “design problem” involved using all those technologies together
Perhaps if I had a greater knowledge of how to manage memory with OpenGL resources, it might have been more viable. Actually, an interesting thought just occurred to me: I wonder if the OpenGL drivers for the cards we were using (can’t remember what they were: they weren’t anything spectacular at all) had memory leaks themselves??? That would be undetectable to us with our tools, and we didn’t get the time to test all the technologies in isolation from each other due to time constraints.
“To all the people who says Memory leaks are detected using special profiling tools, i must say that yes you are right, but Task Manager is a good first hand indication that something wrong is going on, if a program’s memory shown in task manager, keeps on increasing over time.
I have yet to see a program which keeps eating up your RAM and doesn’t have a memory leak or other design problem.”
I’ve been looking for a set of “free as in beer” apps to roadtest ReactOS with, written to a wide variety of MS Windows versions, and this has just made my day! Thanks everybody for contributing, and thanks to Manish Bansal for compiling his list.
Please note – I said Free as in beer, not Free as in Association of Recreational Drano Drinkers of America – I’m not interested in Software Piracy.
Forget about Movie Maker, get an Avid for free
http://www.avid.com/freedv/index.asp?pageElement=flyout
Avid makes a free cut-down version of their software.
Haven’t used CD Burner XP Pro, but I’ll throw a vote in for burnatonce, a simple, small cd-burning utility I’ve come to favor over Nero. It’s essentially a freeware gui for cdrtools like mkisofs and cdrecord.
http://burnatonce.com/
It looks like we all have similar setups to an extent
browser=firefox
mail=thunderbird
cal=sunbird
av= avg
imageviewer=irfanview
vnc=tightVNC
Cpp IDE=bloodshed
C# IDE = borland C# personal edition
ftp=smartftp
telnet=putty
image editing=the GIMP (only had to use it a few times, and it did what i wanted it to do)
Spy sofware=adware, Spybot S&D
Zip=Ultimate ZIP
But a quick note, when i first got my new PC, I tried to only use open office. To put it simply, it works ok, even with its own files…but it simply does not to word documents. I made my basic resume in it (simple text, indents…). exported to word, imported in…and it had errors. so i’m back on ms word 2000.
I suggest looking at the open CD:
http://www.theopencd.org
It has loads of OSS software for windows all with a nice installer and good descriptions of each application.
Here is another free note taking application thats realy good.
http://www.shirusupad.tk/
Firefox users complain too much about not being able to visit certain web sites. Not for me.
Opera is a great browser but is incompatiable with it’s environment. Cannot even export favorites properly.
Kerio firewall is ok if you buy the full version. Or else you may as well use sp2 firewall instead.
Same for Avid, free is missing all the useful stuff.
Freeware is useless if it cannot work for you.
Rainlender has no mention yet. Fully operational, free, no spyware.
Google’s free image viewer picasa is great, only software out there for windows thats similiar to apple’s iphoto. Not great to open u[p an image just so see it, but for cataloginh albums it cant be beat.
WinAMP is the worst choise for the audio player, anything can beat it, unless you listening crappy sound files and don’t like music.
Take a look at WinLibre.
http://www.winlibre.com/en/
WinLibre is a free software (FLOSS) distribution for windows aimed at replacing the most common proprietary software.
* Office : OpenOffice.org 1.1.2
* Internet : FireFox 0.9.2, ThunderBird 0.7.2, FileZilla 2.2.7c, Nvu 0.30,Gaim 0.80
* Create : Gimp 2.0.2, Inkscape 0.9pre, Blender 2.33a, Audacity 1.2.1
* Multimedia : Zinf 2.2.1, WinLame rc3, CDex 1.51, VideoLanClient 0.7.2
* Tools : 7-Zip 3.13, ThightVnc 1.3dev5,NetTime 2.0b7, ClamWin 0.35
I’m amazed nobody has mentioned the best audio ripper:
http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
It gives me perfect rips of copy-protected CDs that fail to rip properly in any other software I’ve tried.
Hello? Are you sane? My old computer used to have 128MB of RAM with Windows XP. After logging in, It was almost completely used up!
This convinced my dad to find some more RAM to give it. We upped to 384MB (or thereabouts) and it ran fine.
Well… if you like free/open software why don’t you change your OS too ?
http://www.reactos.org/
Anyone know of such an application (shareware, freeware or open source software) for windows? It’s one of these apps I can’t live without.
-text editor – crimson editor (similar to editplus/textpad)
-http server – abyss
-pic viewer – XnView (found it to load images faster then -Infran)
-file cleaners – CCleaner and BeClean
-Writing prose (ie. not text editing) – cryptedit
-Calender of sorts, Rainlender (not too powerful, just useful).
The Powertoys tool is really weak (and slow). I’ve found Virtual Dimension to be the best such utility available. It also has a lot of other nifty features (can make windows transparent/translucent, can minimize windows to the system tray, etc.).